Ye ask and ye shall receive

One of my loyal readers wants some Braves road woes talk, and I am happy to oblige. They suck on the road. End of story, sort of. They are 7-18 on the road this year, near the bottom of the league in that category. Everyone except Chipper stops hitting on the road. The real issue is that they have lost 17 straight 1-run games away from the Ted, which tells me that two things... bullpen has been unsteady and clutch, late inning hitting has been non-existent.

Good news though. The Braves decided to go with the all-navy hats yesterday with the grey unis, something I have been hoping for all year, and it paid off with an 8-1 win. They better have the same look going tonight vs. the Reds in Cincy. And does anyone else love the navy blue jerseys as much as I do? I wish they didn't get beat every time they wear them, b/c Bobby will probably hang those up for good if they can't bust a win out in 'em sometime soon.

And these days, no Braves post can go without a Chipper update. After 54 games (50 for him), he is hitting .420. Not a typo folks. The 36 year old is crushing. A couple of interesting items when you dig into his stats. (If you are interested, espn.com has a great stats page full of drillable statlines with a huge array of ways to sort and filter. And I just gave away the fact that I am a geek with no life) Chipper is hitting about .430 from the right side, .415 from the left. Unbelievable consistency from both sides. He leads the NL in walks for the month of May, but is not even in the top 25 for the year, which means pitchers are just now starting to pitch around him... fools I tell you! In addition to his walks, he ranks in the bottom 20 of all qualifying hitters (3.1 AB/game) in strikeouts, with a lowly 18. Unreal. And since this time last year, he has hit a cool .378, obviously best in the major leagues. Any MVP talk that starts developing this summer had better include alot of Chipper talk. Without him, these Braves are 8 games under .500 at best.